On April 11, Wataru Takeshita, the minister for reconstruction of the areas most seriously affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, met in Kamaishi with local government representatives to discuss the budget for Iwate Prefecture. After the meeting, the mayor of Kamaishi spoke to ...

Baseball fans were disheartened to learn that Texas Rangers pitcher Yu Darvish would be out for the entire 2015 season because of elbow surgery. The right-hander could still have a promising Major League career, but like other Japanese pitchers who have crossed the Pacific, ...

While there are many reasons why a city would want to host the Olympic Games, most have to do with money and prestige: The Olympics bring international attention to the host city for two weeks. Consequently, the city has to look its best, but ...

In February, Reporters Without Borders published its annual list of countries ranked in terms of press freedom. Japan came in at No. 61, down two places from the previous year and lower than Taiwan (51) and South Korea (60). The reason for the decline ...

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Japan earlier this month, local coverage focused on a joint German-Japanese statement about the Ukraine crisis and her comment that Japan should forthrightly address its actions during World War II. She said nothing about how Japan and ...

A friend who often goes to Ishikawa Prefecture for family reasons mentioned on Facebook last week that he took the overnight bus from Tokyo and arrived at Kanazawa Station at about the same time of the Hokuriku Shinkansen’s inaugural run. When I asked why ...

The NHK travel program “Tsurube no Kazoku ni Kampai” (“Tsurube Toasts Families”) recently aired a two-parter about the town of Watari in Miyagi Prefecture, which was devastated in the March 11, 2011, tsunami. In the series, rakugo storyteller Shofukutei Tsurube and a celebrity guest ...

Last week, at the end of a report on the TBS newsmagazine show “Hodo Tokushu” about protests against the proposed U.S. Marine Corps base at Henoko in Okinawa, the show’s host mentioned that in response to charges from local press that it had violently ...

On Feb. 13, Asahi Shimbun’s daily Vox Populi, Vox Dei column mentioned Morizo and Kiccoro, the official mascots of the 2005 World Expo held in Aichi Prefecture. These two “woodland fairies” supposedly hailed from Seto, which issued them the same resident cards (jūminhyō) held ...

In his Tokyo Shimbun column about weekly magazines, Hiroyuki Shinoda recently lauded Shukan Asahi for accusing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of exploiting the murder of journalist Kenji Goto by the Islamic State group for political purposes. Shinoda points out that the magazine had been ...

French economist Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was the surprise bestseller of 2014 in the United States, and it has also become a hit in Japan. Piketty’s book was written for an academic readership, but because of his timely theme — how ...

On Christmas Day last year, a 17-year-old boy was sent to prison by the Saitama District Court for the murder of his maternal grandparents. Prosecutors demanded an indefinite sentence, but the court gave him 15 years after taking the boy’s “environment” into consideration. The ...